Corneille (1922-2010)

Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo (3 July 1922 – 5 September 2010), better known under his pseudonym Corneille, was a Dutch artist. Corneille was born in Liege, Belgium, although his parents were Dutch and moved back to the Netherlands when he was 12. He died at Auvers-sur-Oise, France in 2010. He studied art at the Academy of Art in Amsterdam. In college, he became friend of Karel Appel, in 1949 set up CoBrA GROUP arts groups with Appel, Alechinksy, Jorn Y Dubuffet.

His early work was naturalistic, but after being inspired by the joie de vivre of French painters, and in particular by the work of younger artists such as Edouard Pignon, he slowly moved into the Cubist style. The poetic Corneille was strongly influenced by Miro and Klee. After the group dissolved in 1951 he moved to Paris and began collecting African art. These primitive artifacts became evident in his works, which began to take on a more imaginative style, like landscapes seen from a bird’s eye view, exotic birds and stylised forms. Today Corneille lives and works in Paris, he makes visits to Israel where he works with the Jaffa Atalier. On 24 in September 2003 there was an opening of his exhibition of prints, in the Ramat-Gan Museum of Art, Israel.
Corneille was best known for radicalizing the conservative Dutch art world in the early 1950s, making modern art not only acceptable, but embraceable as well. He placed familiar subjects — birds, cats, women and landscapes — in mythological and often childlike contexts, imbuing them with spontaneity and bright, sensual reds. “I am a painter of joy,” Corneille remarked at a 2007 exhibition of his work at the Cobra Museum, said Katja Weitering, the artistic director of the museum, in Amstelveen, near Amsterdam.
Beyond the Netherlands, Corneille’s work is in the collections of several American museums, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.